Death Becomes Her
by Princess Pinky
Summary: This is an alternate ending to 7x21's "Death Becomes Them". What if the Zankou and the Alchemist had brought back the one person who truly would've broken the Charmed Ones' spirits? Their beloved big sister: Prue Halliwell.


**A/N:** Okay, I was never a fan of 7x21's "Death Becomes Them." Zombies are kind of…cheesy. But, I always did wonder why Zankou never thought of bringing back the one person that would've really destroyed their spirits. (Obviously in real life we know, but hey, in the reality of the show it made no sense whatsoever.) So, this is my alternate ending to "Death Becomes Them."

_**Death Becomes Her**_

Zankou stood in the attic before the pedestal at which the all prized Warren Book of Shadows rested. His fingers twitched hungrily at his sides as he stared at the Book like a wolf stares at a bloody hunk of flesh. A carnal grunt escaped his lips.

He knew at precisely that moment, the Charmed Ones would be fighting the innocents they'd lost over the years and up until the recent present, all thanks to him. They were armed with their potions, ready to find and vanquish the Alchemist who he'd tapped to help him. But their emotions would take over and they'd struggle against having to murder the innocents they'd lost all over again.

"But they'll do it," he spoke to the Book, in a sickly devious tone. "They'll fight them hand to hand, they'll use their potions, and poor Piper will blast them to rotting smithereens. And then," he nodded to the Book as if it were really listening to him, "and then they'll be so exposed, like raw nerve ends, that you'll be left wide open to my will."

Zankou tipped forward and reached for the Book of Shadows. A glowing yellow dome burst up around it, shielding it from the demon's clutches. Zankou bore his teeth like a rabid dog and thrust his hands through the force field. Sparks of electricity sprang up, wrapping their electric tentacles around his arms and pumping him full of power. As the Charmed Ones' powers had grown, so had the Book's defenses, and it was as at the height of its power, using all of it to ward off its greatest threat thus far.

"Just a little more…" he grunted, forcing his arms deeper and deeper through the formerly impenetrable field. He could see his hands just centimeters from the Book. He felt a tingle deep in his gut, a lust for the power he would have as soon as he was able to grab the Book. Right then, his fingertips grazed the spin and the pages on each side simultaneously.

The tingle exploded, and so did the electricity. It rippled through him violently, shocking his arms back through the force field. The Book shot off the pedestal and across the room in a final violent backlash and he went the opposite direction, landing in a heap on the hardwood, just below the strained glass windows. As the smoke and dust from the explosion cleared, Zankou rubbed his chin like a clichéd criminal mastermind. He laughed tauntingly at the Book, where it laid on the floor, defiantly closed, across the attic.

"Fine," he said as he stole to his feet again. "If that's how you want to play it, then fine. But my friend, I'll have you soon. Your keepers' may have lasted this long, but trust me, they won't manage the last surprise I have in store for them."

----

Piper flung the torch out at the three decomposing innocents that were coming at her. The tears forming in her eyes felt like acid. She had to blink them back just so she could see where the shove her torch next. Each time she thrust it out, another of the three would come at her from a different direction. The worst part was, she knew all of them on some level, and she'd been able to save none of them.

Her wracked brown eyes settled in on the woman in the middle, dressed in the dirty and tattered – and formerly pristinely white – blouse and floor length skirt. Piper knew her the least – not at all on a personal or even acquaintance level in fact – and thus when she looked at her green and decaying face and pitch black eyes, the pain wasn't as great as the men to either side of her. The memories came flooding back to Piper as the levies in her mind gave way.

_Shadow pointed his finger lazily. "Is this the part where I'm supposed to go 'Wooo-o-o-o! They did their research!' and run away?" he asked sarcastically, waving his hands in mock fright as he spoke._

"_Might be a good idea," Phoebe replied in a threateningly calm voice._

"_Or what…" he rubbed his finger along his face. "…you'll kill me?"_

"_No. Actually," Piper replied with a smirk on her lips, "we'll do worse: we won't touch you."_

"_Look at that," Shadow taunted. "Witches think they have this one figured out. Well, let me tell you all something…" His stood abruptly and his arm shot out, wrapping around the neck of an innocent woman who happened to be passing by. "Don't dance if you don't know the steps!" He brought his other arm around, armed with a knife from one of the café tables, and plunged it into her back._

"_No!" Piper shouted as she threw up her arms to freeze time._

_Phoebe grabbed a knife from the table as she and her sisters clambered their feet. In one swift motion, she speared it into the frozen warlock's side and he burst into a black particle-like explosion. The frozen woman collapsed into Phoebe's arms instantly. "Oh my God!" she yelled as the scene unfroze and she brought the woman to a lying position on the ground._

_Piper fell to her knees beside Prue, with Phoebe directly across from her. She pressed her hands to the bleeding gash in the innocent's abdomen as onlookers and guests at the café began to look their way towards the source of all the commotion._

_Prue flung her head around, "Call nine-one-one!"_

Piper thrust the torch forward, at the innocent whose name she never even had the chance to know. Her stomach lurched as the woman jumped back from the flames. From her peripheral vision, she saw the rotting man to her right jump towards her and she quickly shifted the torch to him, making him rear back from the fire. Although the skin on his face had been burnt away leaving only a skull, the vicious charring of his bones made Piper know exactly who the man was.

"_Please, I don't have much time. Someone has to find my body before it's too late," Mark Chao's ghost explained urgently. He was following Piper down an alley in Chinatown._

"_Too late for what?"_

"_It's a Chinese myth. At least I always thought it was a myth. It's called Diyu, when the gates of hell open…We're almost there."_

"_The gates of hell? I don't understand."_

"_If the gatekeeper, Yama, catches my soul before my body is properly buried, he'll take me to hell. Forever."_

"_But you said that you were murdered. How can-"_

"_Yama doesn't care about good or evil. He just wants souls…" His expression turned dark. "I should've listened to my mother…"_

_Piper was staring at his defeated expression as she walked. When she finally turned her head away, she found herself staring at a charred corpse lying on the ground. She gasped immediately and threw her hands over her eyes. After a moment, she eased her hands away to look again. "Is that you?"_

Technically, she had saved Mark in the end…she had prevented Yama from taking his soul and she had made sure that Mrs. Chao had given him a proper burial, which she and her sisters had attended. She'd even watched Mark move on into the afterlife with his father. But despite that saving him after the fact, he had left a hole in her heart that she'd never been able to repair.

She used his recipes from time to time, the old Chinese recipes that Mark's father had translated for him. And whenever she made pecking duck, she always found herself crying. She'd only known Mark for a couple days, and as a ghost that she couldn't even touch, but somehow he'd managed to touch her heart in a way that only one other man she'd ever met had been able to do, and that was Leo.

A part of her had always wondered – albeit guiltily given the way her life turned out with her angel of a husband and two beautiful boys that she loved more than life itself – what her life would've been like had she'd met Mark before he died, when he'd had both body and soul. Her heart lurched because in all the ways she'd imagined how it might've been, this had _not_ been it. Yes, she had _saved_ him, but she'd also _lost_ something that she'd never have a chance to know.

Her eyes glazed over again and everything in her line of vision became blurry, like a bad watercolor painting. She quickly fluttered her eyes to move out the tears and successfully caused them to drain down her cheeks. She noticed the third zombie moving towards her just in time and jerkily shoved the torch out in front of herself like a baton. The zombie locked his cold, dead eyes with hers and chills ran up her spine.

"_Piper," Prue spoke determinedly, "when I tell you, just let that go."_

"_What?" Phoebe yelped in alarm._

_Piper stared wide eyed at the rusty blades in front of her: one was being held in mid air by her freezing power alone, while the other Prue and her former doctor, the man who had treated her when she'd been diagnosed with Arroyo Fever, Curtis Williamson, were telekinetically battling for control over. "But-"_

"_We're done playing around," Prue stated firmly. "Hit the deck, now!" She retracted her arm in time with Piper and the three sisters dropped to the ground. The blade she'd been holding with her power, as well as the blade Piper had kept on a freeze, sped over their heads. Prue's blade hit the wall and fell, while Piper's hit a metal pipe and recoiled like a boomerang._

_The blade spun back threw the air and right into Dr. Williamson's chest with a chopping sound akin to a butcher's clever as it dug into meat. The doctor stumbled backwards several steps and growled, before reaching his hands around the blade and forcefully ripping it out of his stomach. Blood began to color his white lab coat along the rusty incision line. He managed to lock eyes with Piper before falling to the ground like a ragdoll._

"_No!" Piper shrieked, before tearing away from her sisters and dropping to her knees beside Dr. Williamson. She placed her hands over his blood chest wound. "Oh God!" She fisted his white lab coat. "Please don't die!" she begged, her voice cracking with each word. "Come on! Look at me, come on! Don't do this. Come on. Come on! Please don't die!" she begged, before placing her head onto his unmoving chest. Her body began to shake as racked sobs escaped her throat._

"_Piper…honey…" Phoebe attempted._

"_I'm…sorry!" Piper cried._

Dr. Williamson's decaying hands latched onto the thick wooden middle of the torch and rested it away from Piper, tossing it to the stone cold floor of the mausoleum, leaving her physically defenseless against the decaying ghosts of her past.

Piper began to shake her head in alarm. She raised her hands in an attempt to use her non-offensive power. For a millisecond, the three zombies before her seemed to freeze, but under the control of their Alchemist, they quickly broke free and continued to come at her.

"Please don't make me do this!" she begged. The sound of Phoebe's struggled cries pierced her ears as she was held down by Tim and Inspector Davidson and slowly strangled to death. Then her head flitted to the side, glancing a glimpse of Paige struggling under Joanna's weight.

Piper closed her eyes, fighting away the tears that threatened to fall again. "God help us!" She looked directly at Dr. Williamson's corpse and raised her hands. He exploded in a vicious eruption of rotting skin and bone. Next she turned to her female innocent and flicked her wrists again, blasting the woman with her power. The woman's scream echoed through the mausoleum as she was killed for a second time. Lastly she turned to Mark, and with tears running heavily down her face, she motioned her fingers for a third time, and her almost-lover shattered into bone dust.

"_No!"_ the Alchemist screamed in horror.

The distraction of his voice caused Joanna to look up from her struggle with Paige, the latter of whom managed to grab the green potion vial meant for the Alchemist and slam it into the chest of her former charge. What was left of the blonde innocent's earthly remains exploded into oblivion, leaving no trace of her left.

Piper aimed her hands painfully towards where Phoebe was being attacked and in two sharp blasts, both Inspector Reece Davidson and Tim blew into dust. Piper swallowed uneasily and curled her flexed hands into fists as Phoebe and Paige ran to either side of her.

"It's okay," Phoebe whispered as she touched Piper's trembling arm, "you had to."

"We all had to," Paige agreed quietly.

Piper cupped her hands together, unable to say anything. She knew the only way for them to escape was for her to use her power against the innocents, but the sting of her double betrayal to them wasn't any lessened by that truth.

"You!" the Alchemist hissed. "He told me you wouldn't! You _couldn't!_" He was shaking he was so angry by the loss of his beloved pets. He raised his finger. "And now you'll have to pay in full for what you've done!" He motioned his arm and a pink glow emanated from his hand. He stepped aside and simultaneously, all three Charmed Ones gasped.

"What? No warm welcome?" Prue Halliwell asked as she stepped into view. Of all the zombies the sisters had encountered that day, Prue looked the most pristine. She, after all, had been embalmed at Phoebe's insistence, despite there being no viewing held during the funeral, because Phoebe had been able to bear the thought of her sister rotting away in some that dark coffin.

Prue was visibly different though, dead in every sense of the word. Her skin, most noticeably, looked like sheet white candle wax, and her blue eyes were filmed over. Her long black hair was still styled nearly with a large antique gold clip, though, and she still wore the long strapless white dress and silver strappy heeled sandals that Phoebe had picked out to have her sister buried in.

The eldest sister flung out her arm: something else that she still had even in death was her lightning quick reflexes…and her powers. Piper, Phoebe, and Paige were each sent sailing in opposite directions and forcefully crushed against the walls. They slid into heaps as Prue marched into the center of the mausoleum; her heels echoed in the hallow space and made her movement sound quite ominous. She strode right up to Piper and motioned her hand, telekinetically dragging her sister up the wall and then bringing her to a stop, pinned, so she could look right into her cataract-looking eyes.

"_You killed me!"_ Prue screamed. "I had time reversed to _save you_ and it _killed me!_" She squeezed her hand and a red handprint began to form around Piper's neck as Prue telekinetically strangled her.

Tears squeezed from Piper's eyes as she struggled to breath against her dead sister's magic. She'd been told the story by Leo, how Prue had demanded that time be reversed so that Piper could be saved, and yet Prue had paid Death's toll in the end. "I-I'm s-s-o-rry," she choked.

"Get off of her!" Paige hollered, suddenly appearing in a swathe of orbs. She ran at Prue and tackled her to the ground, releasing the former's chokehold on their sister.

"And you!" Prue seethed through yellowed teeth. She smacked Paige hard across the face, using her telekinesis to amplify the attack, forcing Paige to slide across the floor. "You tried to replace me! You tried to steal my sisters and my room and replace me!" She thrust out her hand again, using her power to smack Paige's skull against the floor several times. "You little _half-breed bitch!_ You can never replace me! You will _never_ be as good as I was!"

A heavy cream colored heel impaled itself into Prue's side, spinning her around. "Hiyah!" Phoebe bellowed, curling her fist and implanting it into Prue's face. Her chest inflated and fell rapidly as she watched Prue collapse to the ground. "You're not my sister!" she snarled, still with her fists curled defensively in front of her.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Prue growled. She shot out her foot, swiping Phoebe's legs out from under her and bringing her to the ground. The deceased witch quickly slammed the heel of her shoe into Phoebe's abdomen, causing her sister to cry out in pain as she was shoved into Benjamin Turner's coffin. Prue jumped to her feet and raised her arm, using her mind to bring Phoebe to her full height. She immediately balled her fist and slammed it into Phoebe's jaw. "Even in death you'll never be as good as me!" she taunted.

"Get away from her!" Piper screamed.

Prue looked over her shoulder, momentarily abandoning Phoebe and allowing her to drop back to the ground. Her cloudy eyes focused in on Piper. "Or you'll what?" she grinned maliciously. "You know you can't use your powers on me, Piper! Even if you _wanted_ to."

"You're right," Piper replied calmly. "But I can still use my power to explode the air around you!" She forcefully threw out her hands, aiming her power at big sister. The air molecules in front of Prue sped up and combusted, sending Prue fling across the mausoleum. Piper quickly ran to Phoebe's side and helped her to her feet. "Come on, I can't help Paige up by myself!"

Together, Piper and Phoebe scampered over to Paige and grabbed one of her arms each to help her up. A small pool of blood had dribbled out of Paige's mouth and onto the floor as she'd laid there. As her sisters sat her up, Paige's head rolled onto Piper's shoulder. "P-Piper…" she muttered.

"It's okay," Piper eased. "You're gonna be fine! We just have to get out of here!"

"You're not going anywhere!" Prue scowled. The entire mausoleum shook with her fury. She back flipped, suddenly in front of her three sisters. Her hand rose quickly to attack, as did Piper's, but Prue's was much faster.

"C-c-offin!" Paige coughed, spitting blood from her mouth as she spoke the words. Her fingers barely twitched as her arm hung over Phoebe's shoulders, but it was enough. Prue's corpse engulfed in orbs and vanished.

"Agh!" the Alchemist screamed. His eyes were wide. "You can't do that! You can't send them back!"

Piper scowled and flicked her hand. While her power didn't explode it, it was enough to throw him into the wall and knock him out. She focused back in on Paige, managing to help her sister up with Phoebe's help. Together, she and Phoebe managed to drag Paige across the mausoleum and begin helping her up the steps leading into the cemetery.

----

A red sheen blinked across the triquetra on the ancient leather bound cover of the Book of Shadows. A smile slithered onto Zankou's lips. He'd been watching the Book intently for the last fifteen minutes, waiting and wondering when it would be a good time to try again.

"Let's see how your resolve is now," he laughed as he bent down towards the Book. It sat there, not hopping, jumping, or sliding away from him. He narrowed his eyes and raised his hand over the cover, but the Book did not move. Tentatively, he dropped his hand, placing it just centimeters from the triquetra, and no force field arose.

Confidently, the demon slammed his hand against the cover. When no shock of retaliation hit him, he began to laugh. "I knew that would break them! Their beloved Big Sister, back from the dead and set on destroying them." He picked up the Book of Shadows and tenderly traced the red Triple Goddess symbol. "And now the entire power of the Warren line is in my hands, literally." With an echoing laugh, he vanished in a drape of roaring flames.

**To Be Continued…**

**A/N:** This ends with a TBC because the real episode did and this is my rewrite of that, but as of yet, I have not made a sequel of rewrite of "Something Wicca This Way Goes" and I'm not sure if I will, so that's just my warning that the TBC doesn't necessarily mean there will be a conclusion. I may or may not write one, depending on if anyone's interested in a conclusion and/or if I have time to do a conclusion.


End file.
